Feature Name

Fully Testable Perl.

Summary

Provide the ability to re-test installed Perl packages (primarily CPAN-hosted packages) by automatically providing the test suites of each distribution as their own "perl-Foo-tests" subpackage, and providing a framework to test.

Owner

Current status

Detailed Description

Perl has a long history and culture of testing, which has resulted in a very high percentage of the packages on the CPAN (Comprehensive Perl Archive Network) containing significant test suites. While these test suites are executed at build time, a large number of modern Perl packages (e.g. Moose, DBIx::Class, Catalyst, etc) depend on a significant number of other packages, which may be owned by a different maintainer and updated independently.

That is, the tests results from %check are only valid so long as the environment in which they are run does not change from the set of packages the package is built and tested in. Additionally, there are many reasons one or more tests may be disabled under the buildsystem:

Network or $DISPLAY access is required; or some other operation not permitted / possible in the buildsystem is required.

Including packages the test requires would cause a circular build dep loop.

A highly specific test environment is needed, e.g. a database setup.

Packages which cannot be included in Fedora (e.g. DBD::DB2, DBD::Oracle) are required to exercise functionality for testing.

This feature proposes to automatically bundle the package test suite into a -tests subpackage without requiring additional maintainer work (a la debuginfo), which can then be installed to provide the capability to test (or retest) functionality post installation.

Benefit to Fedora

Being able to execute the tests of a Perl dist post-build will leverage existing code (the test suites) to allow the end user to perform sanity checks and rule out problems with the underlying code when tracking down bugs.

The net benefit to Fedora is to create an environment where end users (support, programmers, etc) will be able to execute the test suites of the 900+ CPAN dists Fedora packages natively, to track down bugs, test functionality the buildsystem was unable to provide, or just validate their environment.

Having the test suite used to build the package under koji would allow someone to test their modules without having to move away from the Fedora perl packages. It will:

Example

For example, Moose is a modern metaobject-based class framework for Perl 5. It's been around for awhile, has a stable user API, and is extremely powerful. It has a slew of dependencies, as well as extensions in the MooseX::* namespace. Sometimes these extensions take advantage of the metaobject system -- those that do can be highly sensitive to backend changes in both Moose and Class::MOP. MooseX::AttributeHelpers is one such extension -- providing alternate attribute metaclass objects for different data structures. Indeed, Moose's build script explicitly checks for certain levels of modules it knows it will break.

Scope

Don't obsess over the details!The exact details of implementation, e.g. where to put the test suites, how to execute them, and how to implement the RPM macros are still evolving; it is also expected to change based on upstream's feedback. The general intent and purpose will remain the same, but the details will evolve as this feature is implemented.

There are three main components to this feature.

Perl-QA

We should work with upstream for input on how to retain these tests in a coherent, consistent, usable form. (Upstream in this case would be the perl-qa mailing list.)

Objectives:

Determine the scope and details of any upstream effort to do this, including any "test-after-install" framework.

Determine where to store the test suites; if upstream is willing to specific a "canonical" directory or if Fedora should implement our own.

RPM macros implementation

The model for this effort is the "behind the scenes" packaging of debugging information into -debuginfo subpackages. While it doesn't appear that we have any sort of generic hook to tie into at this point, there are a couple things that could be done.

Work with upstream to take the %debug_package macro and reimplement it on top of a "generic" packaging hook.

Testing Framework

TODO.

User Experience

John Q. Fedoraite

TODO.

Package Maintainers

TODO.

Administrators, Developers, etc

TODO.

Dependencies

Aside from the steps detailed under "Scope", above, there are no additional dependencies. As Perl packages are rebuilt, their -tests subpackage will be automatically generated without requiring any intervention by the package maintainer.

Contingency Plan

Failure of this feature to be ready for Fedora 26 only means that this feature will not be available. Existing functionality will not be impaired.